Practical Content Strategy & Marketing – Book Interview

Heidi Cohen Interviews Julia McCoy

Q: What’s your best piece of advice for readers looking to improve their marketing?

Get your writing skills down. Great, engaging copy is the core of great content marketing—I can’t stress that enough!

The basics of writing are critical, but easy to overlook and tough to learn. It takes discipline to learn content writing. But it’s worth it: your conversion rates, ranking, and content readability all get better if the copy is better.

I created a 6-week course in 2017, called the Practical Content Strategy Certification Course. This course was about 1,000 hours to create, and even more in research and real-time industry surveying. I partnered with experts to collaborate and create guest lessons with me. After I was done, sitting back and looking at the curriculum, I realized the 200-odd pages of video content I’d scripted for the course would make a fantastic book. I took a month to rework all the written content and turn it into a 366-page book, full of concepts and exercises.

Q: What is the key concept behind your book?

The key concept behind my book is that there are critical cores in practical content marketing that every good content strategist (and marketer/creator) must know. Here is the image of those cores:

Knowing “how” to execute, fulfill, and convey each of these pillars is what I teach in both my new book and the accompanying course.

Q: What do you want readers to take away from your book?

Through this book, I want to give a definition to content strategist. Define the real, actual, practical skillsets involved in their workload. I want to change and impact newcomers to the industry and give them a complete roadmap to profitable content marketing—what I wish I had when I started.

Q: How do you describe yourself professionally?

I educate on and teach practical content strategy by helping content creators get off the ground and learn high-ROI strategy & marketing skills. I also run a top-rated content agency that offers done-for-you content creation services.

Q: What are 1-3 books that inspired your work/career?

Q: What is the biggest challenge that you’ve had to overcome in your life or career?

In running my content agency, I had to teach myself how to run a business, people management, and how to hire and fire—and I went through failure after failure to find and build the right team. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is learn to “trust with transparency.” By that I mean trusting my team along with asking for transparency and holding them to that transparency. It took me forever to learn how to run a successful team and manage my team members. Now, I trust with transparency: I trust my team fully, because they are the right people and they’re super qualified: but I also know what my team is doing, I hold them accountable to the work they’re paid to do, and I maintain transparency on both sides, including holding frequent meetings and spending time with them, to get to know them and let me in on their true feelings.

Q: What’s something unusual or fun that most people don’t know about you?

I own and play a 22-string Celtic harp!

Q: Is there a piece of content, a social media campaign or a marketing campaign that you worked on that you’re particularly proud of?

Yes—I recently did a massive study on my productivity as a content creator to inspire others. This was one of the biggest questions I was asked in 2016: “how do you do it all?”

I created a blog and podcast out of the case study I put together on productivity with 18 top productivity tips.

Q: Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?

I always like to end my bios by sharing that I’m also a wife and a mom to a 3-year-old, to prove that the impossible can be done—run a company, write books, host a podcast, and parent a toddler. It felt appropriate to share as we close! 🙂

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